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Liberals hoping to find in this book a rousing trumpet call to tear down the bastions of entrenched privilege will be disappointed. There is more sober description on offer here than prescription. Conservatives remembering Kevin Phillip's prescient 1969 advice ("The Emerging Republican Majority") on how the GOP could dominate the rest of the century will be even more disappointed; Phillips sees the time as ripe for a progressive realignment that will bring nothing but pain to the Lott/Armey axis. The book recounts, at two different scales, the history of wealth and the elites to which it has accumulated. The shorter scale is that of American political cycles, with revolving eras of conservative wealth concentration and progressive wealth distribution. The longer scale concerns the cycle of rise and fall of the four great economic empires of modern history: Spain in the 17th century, Holland in the 18th, Britain in the 19th, and the U.S. in the 20th. He returns to each series of cycles repeatedly, with an emphasis on different aspects of the cycles: the roles of technology, of wars, of speculative bubbles, of fashions in legislation and ideology. The repetition occasionally threatens tedium, but fresh details rise up to relieve it. Along the way, he provides a feast of specifics and statistics, in easily accessible charts which the reader will find useful whether or not he agrees with Phillips' conclusions. The message he gleans from the shorter scale is a familiar one, if something of a minority report in the current era. Money flows. In hard times, it trickles; in boom times, it roars in cataracts. At no time, as he richly documents, has its motion ever been determined primarily by "market forces." It has always been pumped from pocket to pocket by the grace of government. And money has proven to be a highly compressible fluid. During each of America's great wars - the Revolution, the Civil War, and the two World Wars - profits have been compressed and pooled among a few suppliers of loans and materiel, creating new moneyed elites. In those eras which have exalted "the market" - the Gilded Age, the roaring twenties, and our current period - government has pumped the refreshing liquid from the middle class to those elites; in eras exalting reform and democracy - the political realignments of Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and the two Roosevelts - the direction has been reversed, though never to the point of actually dismantling the old fortunes. Inequality of wealth in the U.S. has now reached the highest levels we've enjoyed since 1929, with the top 1% owning 44% of the goodies. And of course, the primary purpose and effect of the Bush tax cuts is to pump a still higher percentage to the same elite. The inequality peak may not yet be in sight, the figure at the height of the Gilded Age having been about 60%; but history informs us that ultimately these levels of inequality aren't sustainable. Phillips doesn't venture to say how long it will be until the next realignment; but each time it has happened, the suddenness and vehemence of middle class anger has taken the rich elite by surprise. On the broader scale of national fall and rise, the message is more somber: Phillips believes we are on the cusp of a fall. He lists ten characteristics shared by Spain, Holland, and England on the brink of decline (most notably, growing income disparity, export of manufacturing with profits coming largely from the financial sector, and vigorous rejection of tarriffs), all of which are plainly rampant in the present U.S. economy. It's difficult to walk away from this book with a sound bite summary. Our author is examining complex interlocked patterns across centuries. What you'll walk away with is an enlarged perspective, and perhaps a worried mind.